Cricket Season - Ashes Game 1, November 23 2017

Oh my god oh my god oh my god it’s that time again - put on your comfy shorts and prepare your couch for a marathon summer of working your arse groove back in, because it’s motherfucking cricket season, and even better: it’s the motherfucking Ashes. 

The Ashes is an ancient tradition that is based around the hatred between England and Australia that started about 200 years ago when England decided to send their prisoners to a literal paradise, and kept everyone else in the darkest, wettest, coldest country imaginable, and then became horrendous at a sport that they invented. 

In recent years, Australia has tried to even out the whole “being shit at sport” thing – we have lost tennis, rugby, soccer and cricket matches to other countries, but we always put on a special performance when it comes to the Ashes.  It used to be that Australia had a genetic engineering program that would produce cricketers capable of single-handedly destroying an entire English team with nothing more than a sneer of his moustache or a surreptitious adjustment of his box.

That program seems to have been put on hold for the moment as we use more controversial techniques, such as ensuring that at least one Marsh brother is in the team at all time, or picking a wicketkeeper whose last first-class century happened not only when the current national coach was still playing literally a decade ago, but who isn’t actually a wicketkeeper for his own state, and that state is Tasfuckingmania.    

This Australian Ashes side isn’t about making the English batsmen look like idiots.  It’s not about proving their bowlers to be inadequate.  It’s about inspiring every Australian cricket fan out there, all 24 million of us (I’m assuming), that despite not being good at cricket, despite not even playing cricket, you too could one day wear the baggy green. 

It’s Ashes time, Straya.  Make yourself a cape out of the flag, grab a stubbie holder with the Southern Cross on it, set your TV to Channel 9 and throw away your remote control, mix beer with your Weetbix tomorrow – it’s cricket season.

Finally.